Lola is sleeping on the mudroom floor at Nick and Amy's ranch in New Mexico and I'm having coffee in the kitchen and sorting through pictures while everyone else is out working on fences.

I went out yesterday to see the mesa where they will put the cows for the summer but stayed back today.

Carrying my house with me and going back to it every night, serial visitation, helping out but then stealing away to work on the trailer, etc. It all seems like both very heavy and very light traveling. I want to be a boon to the people I'm visiting, and a good participant, but I'm also always about to leave and always keep an eye on the trailer. It's tricky

Lola and I arrived at Chico Basin Ranch in Colorado about a week ago and left on Monday and then my breaks leaked and burned in Pueblo on Tuesday

Chico feels the same as before though there's a lot more green grass now. Before I'd even arrived there was strategizing about what materials we'd need to adapt a flatbed to fit a truck there

(Though I guess not quite enough. I felt like a fool when we got to the steel yard, Speken Iron, in Pueblo two days later and I asked for some channel iron using the wrong terminology and measurements: "You boys look lost. Are you lost?... You boys buy much channel iron before? Not hardly at all? Okay..." Anyway, they were finally kind to us there and they gave us what we wanted.)

At 4:45 the morning after I arrived we met to trailer out to a branding and then I slept for 12 hours. Heady and irresistible inertia.

That's the dinner Nick and I cooked after working for a few days updating his truck. Bull burger tortillas.

On Sunday, the ranch was quiet and I pulled into the shop to finally build the folding bed in the trailer.

This is cousin John and cousin-once-removed Colette in Colorado Springs. I spent a quiet evening and morning with them and left with peaches and pork chops, and a propane camp stove, a 5-gallon water container, and a little canvas stool from aunt Barb.